When the New York Timesâ website fell prey to a high profile hack Tuesday, you may have wondered how a huge, multimillion dollar corporation could get hacked in the first place. From there, it's not that far to another terrifying idea: âIf the NYT didnât stand a chance, what hope is there for my own website?â
The NYT attack actually targeted the site's records in the Internet's DNS, or Domain Name System. Since computers speak in numbers and we speak in letters, DNS is what converts any IP address to a easy-to-remember address like nytimes.com. DNS hacking is a vulnerability that every website faces. (In the NYT's case, the attackers apparently changed its DNS records so that visitors to the newspaper instead ended up on a Syrian website.)